New Courses Draw Golfers

Spain is fast becoming Europe's Florida, a place where the plaid-pants crowd can wield a five-iron in winter on a celebrity-designed fairway or retire to a $500,000 villa by the ninth hole.

Since 1990, more than 200 championship-level courses have been christened throughout the country, from the misty hills of Galicia to the marshlands of Cádiz and rugged cliffs of Alicante.

Golfers can now tee off on a fairway lined with cactus in the Arizona-like desert of Almería, on the Mediterranean, or try for a hole-in-one nearly 1,000 feet above the ocean on the volcanic island of Tenerife, off the African coast. So many greens dot Málaga province — 40 in a 62-mile stretch at last count — that the Costa del Sol has acquired a new nickname: the Costa del Golf.

Another 300 courses are planned for construction across the country in the next decade. Should municipal authorities give them all the green light despite severe water shortages and slowly mounting pressure from the environmental ministry, Spain would have among the highest concentrations in Europe, about the same as Sweden or Germany and second only to Britain.

This is good news for the estimated 500,000 golfers, mostly German, British and Scandinavian, who haul their clubs to Spain each year. The next wave is seen coming from American players. A growing number of golf resorts are trying to lure the California or Florida faithful with packages that combine putt practice with culture, like a side trip to Seville or a sherry winery.

Environmentalists in Spain have plenty of reason to bristle. Spain is a drought-prone country should not use its scarce water supply — even recycled water from nearby homes, which many developers say they use — to keep so many fairways green. It has been reported the news that in Málaga this summer, water was allowed to fill only the public swimming pools, with additional restrictions on tap water.

Original Roman columns, and a few replicas, dot the 18-hole golf course at the Hotel Villa Padierna, a Tuscan-themed resort run by Ritz-Carlton, which opened in 2003 near yacht-lined Marbella. A Roman-style amphitheater overlooks some of the greens, just outside the spa.

The fairway at the Abama resort on Tenerife, which opened last year, was designed by Dave Thomas and climbs to about 1,000 feet above sea level. Each hole overlooks the ocean. The sand for the traps was imported because the island’s natural sand is black.

In Benidorm, Spain’s quintessential package-tour playground on the Mediterranean, the Real de Faula Golf Resort and Spa, with both a Sheraton hotel and a Westin, mimics the look of a typical Mediterranean town. Its two 18-hole courses, designed by Jack Nicklaus, surround a jazz club, a restaurant complex and other candy-colored buildings designed to look like churches and cloisters.

Farther south in Murcia, a citrus and vegetable-growing region, the Spanish developer Polaris World is building an entire golf empire — with 35,000 vacation homes, three hotels run by the Inter-Continental chain and a “Nicklaus Golf Trail,” a series of nine courses designed by Jack Nicklaus or by his firm, Nicklaus Design, within a 15.5-mile radius. They hope that this brand-name circuit will be enough to lure American golfers across the ocean.

Even the dusty central plains of La Mancha, fictional stomping grounds of Don Quixote, has caught the tee-off craze. By 2014, the city of Ciudad Real — rarely a stop on any tourist itinerary — will house a $3.85 billion resort, the Reino de Don Quijote de la Mancha. It will have two 18-hole golf courses, a 9-hole course, several themed hotels, a Japanese-style spa and a casino run by Harrah’s.

But perhaps the most unusual putter’s oasis under way is Marina d’Or Golf, in the small Mediterranean town of Oropesa del Mar, north of Valencia. It will have two courses designed by Greg Norman; another by Sergio García of Spain; a ski slope; six themed hotels, including one built around an aquarium; and a plastic surgery clinic.

All of these new upscale resorts come with the backing of Spanish tourism officials and hotel industry leaders. They are very focused on people willing to spend 60 to 200 euros a day ($78 to $262 at $1.31 to the Euro) on a greens fee, or 2,000 euros ($2,565) for five days at a hotel with lessons from a pro.

But the environmental ministry is beginning to clamp down on building, and some Spaniards are beginning to join environmentalists in a backlash against encroaching fairways and cookie-cutter villas.

Each week, it seems, the front page of national newspapers describes the latest investigation linked to the developments, often involving alleged political corruption in the awarding of permits to build on rural land. In some rural regions, outraged residents have begun to stage protests. Last month, a tiny Andalusian town, Cuevas del Becerro, went on strike in fear that a planned golfing community would usurp its water supply.

In crowded coastal towns, however, many Spaniards say the resorts look positively outdoorsy compared with the Miami-skyline look that has been popular since the 1970s. They view the low-key golfers as deliverance from generations of rowdy spring-break-style vacationers.